Molinism: Understanding Free Will and Predestination

 

Why Molinism matters

The Bible is clear in saying that God knows the future. Jesus knows ahead of time that Judas will betray Him. Jesus seemed to know before Judas had even decided to do this. And what if Judas had changed His mind? Jesus knew beforehand that Peter would deny even knowing Him. Peter was in total disagreement about this. How does God know future events like this? Some Calvinists are actually Molinists!  But other Calvinists argue that God cannot simply look ahead in time and observe the future. They say that God must be in control of the future. I would say it like this. God possesses the essential attribute of Aseity. This means that God is in no way dependent on anything outside of Himself. This includes God’s own knowledge. God doesn’t simply know what happens in the world by observing it. Rather, God’s knowledge of the future comes from Himself.

If you think about it, the doctrine of Aseity means that God controls what we do at any time. The fact that an event is future or present is actually irrelevant. A classic way of defining God in Christian Philosophy is to say, “God is a maximally great being.” In other words, God is a being that has all great making properties maxed out. Power is a great making property. Therefore, God has the absolute max of power. Mercy is a great making property. Therefore, God has maximum mercy. You can go right down the list with things like love, knowledge, wisdom, etc. Thus, we can defend the attribute of Aseity this way. Which God is greater? Is it the God that depends on things outside Himself for His knowledge or the one that does not? The greater God seems to be the one that does not. Therefore, there seems to be a good philosophical justification for Aseity.

Some Christians argue that the entire project of Philosophy is sinful based on a misunderstanding of what philosophy actually is. The funny thing is that they do philosophy without calling it by that name, and then their philosophical stance tends to direct how they view the Bible. For more on this topic, see this article and scroll down to section 6:

https://benjoiner.pw/defend-apologetics

Some tend to end their investigation of this question at this point. It’s a sad thing to do, because there is so much interesting intellectual work awaiting us. Theology has sometimes been defined as “Faith Seeking Understanding.” The Bible is loaded with commandments. It is loaded with criticism of people for disobeying God. It is clear both Biblically and Philosophically that God is in no way evil. God has goodness maxed out. Therefore, all sin and evildoing is against God’s will. Since such things clearly exist both in the Bible and in everyday life, things clearly happen that are against God’s will.

The simplest explanation is to say that we control what we do, and this explains why we sin against God’s will. But then, what about God’s control over what we do? How does Jesus know ahead of time that Peter will deny Him and that Judas will betray Him? This is where Molinism comes into the picture. It’s a way of explaining how God’s control of our actions and our control of our actions can coexist without there being a problem. If that seems impossible to you, congratulations, you are engaging in philosophy.

It’s funny how often people interpret the Bible in a specific way due to their own preferred philosophy. It’s easy to hold a philosophical stance from outside the Bible that directs how one understands the Bible. And yet, that philosophical stance is seen as simple something obvious and never investigated itself. If it hold so much sway, it most certainly should be scrutinized. Some people focus on the verses that emphasize God’s control while others focus on verses that focus on Man’s control. Both sides reason that you can’t take all of the Bible literally because of a philosophical stance that they bring to the Bible. They don’t get it from the Bible. The Bible clearly teaches both twin truths of Man’s responsibility and God’s sovereign control. If the Bible sees no problem, then maybe we shouldn’t either?

I must stress that I am in no way the inventor of Molinism. Young people today have been indoctrinated to think that if you teach or share something, then you must be the creator of it. Otherwise you are a plagiarist or a culturally appropriating something. Molinism comes from Luis de Molina in the 1500’s as a response to John Calvin and controversies within the Roman Catholic Church.

This will be hard to understand, and that is how it 

should be.

I once spoke with a pastor of Jehovah’s Witness church many years ago. He insisted that since the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is hard to understand, then people shouldn’t believe it. I responded by saying that any doctrine of God is going to be hard to understand. How does he explain how God knows the future and yet man has free choice? He had no answer. What I didn’t know at the time was that the Jehovah’s Witnesses practice something called thought control. It’s literally a sin to think about certain topics.

The topics we are about to discuss will be both intellectually challenging and stimulating. It’s a good idea to agonize over them. The Bible has basically challenged us to do this. It tells us that Man and God are in control. But it leaves us to answer how that can be. If we take the Bible seriously, then we are willing to do the intellectual work of finding a way. Don’t think that these topics shouldn’t blow your mind. Trying to understand God really should blow your mind. That’s perfectly fine. That’s what should happen.

Key Concepts: Truth Value, Logical Necessity, 

Counterfactual Propositions, Possible Worlds

There are four difficult concepts that we will need to understand in order to understand Molinism. Let’s define them briefly at first. Then we will go into more detail.

1)Truth Value

Statements that claim a truth are called propositions. They have a truth value of being either true or false.

2)Logical Necessity

Propositions that have logical necessity cannot fail to be true at any time or any place.

3)Counterfactual Propositions

Statements that claim what would be true if a condition is met, even if the fact is that it is never met.

4)Possible Worlds

A terminology that helps us discuss all logical possibilities. The real world is a possible world. But anything that could be different about our world is also a possible world.

Truth Value

What may be confusing here is that a statement can have a negative or positive truth value. Let’s say that John says, “It is raining outside.” Let’s say that it is not raining. Then John’s statement has negative truth value. Or you can say that it’s truth value is false.

Logical Necessity

My favorite illustration for this is with a shoebox, attic, and watches. Imagine that you place three gold watches in a shoebox. You put the lid on the box and put the box in your attic. You wait one year. You retrieve the shoebox and open it. You find four gold watches in the box. What will you conclude? You may conclude that you forgot how many you put in there. It has been a year. You may conclude that someone put another one in there.

What you will never conclude is that the number 3 equals the number 4. Why not? That will perfectly explain your observations! Just say that the number of the watches in the box is the same both times! In reality, you’d believe that watches can have babies before you’d believe that 3 = 4. That’s logical necessity. It’s simply impossible for three to ever, at any time or place, equal the number four. Fantastically absurd things like watches giving birth is more believable than that.

The proposition “Three does not equal four” is necessarily true. It’s true by the necessity of it’s own nature. Nothing outside of itself makes it true. It’s simply impossible for it to be true. Alternatively, imagine that John says there is a cat outside the door. Imagine that Sally says there are no cats outside the door. But let’s say that Steven claims they are both right. It’s logically impossible for Steven to be right. We can know Steven is wrong without looking outside at all. We could get specific and say that John is saying no cats are touching the door and Sally is talking about a cat 3 feet from the door. But let’s imagine that John and Sally are saying contradictory things in the exact same sense. In that case, it is logically necessary that Steven’s proposition has a truth value of false. And you don’t even have to look outside to know it.

A further related question is this. Can God do logically impossible things? Can God make statements that are false by logical impossibility somehow become true? Can God make 3 = 4? We can speak of this in a simplistic way and say that God can’t do logically impossible things. But that’s not technically accurate. Rather, logically impossible things aren’t really things. You can’t do or not do them because they cannot have a definition. They are meaningless. A classic way of putting this is to say that God can’t create a rock too big for Him to lift. It’s not accurate to say that He can’t do it. That’s a trickery hidden in how things are worded. More accurately, we can say that God doesn’t have the power of not having a power. This is because not having a power isn’t really a power.

Or, let’s pretend that God can do logically impossible things. In that case, God can create the rock, and He can lift it. You may complain that God cannot lift the rock. But why? That’s because being beyond His ability to lift it is essentially what the rock is. And when you say that, you are saying it’s logically impossible. Hopefully this helps us get the point. But, boy oh boy, get ready for a wild ride from here.

Counterfactual Propositions

My preferred way of discussing Counterfactual Propositions is to begin with the old Greek idea of Fatalism. The reasoning went like this. On October 13 next year, you will have pancakes for breakfast. That proposition is already true or false. Future statements already have truth value. You will either eat the pancakes or you will not. The Greeks reasoned that it is therefore logically necessarily true that you will do whatever it is already true that you will do. All events in the future occur due to logically necessity. There was plenty of unsuccessful push back against fatalism in Greek philosophy. But purely logical fatalism dominated.

Thus, the universe functions according to logically necessary principles. Literally every single thing that happens cannot fail to happen. This greatly directed their scientific work. They rejected observational science in favor of deductive reasoning. That’s the best way to find logically necessary truths. The Epicurean Philosophical school rejected this idea and was in favor of using observations to do science. But they never did the intellectual heavy lifting of defending this stance well. They were just lucky guessers.

The fatalistic approach prevailed. On this idea, there is no human freedom to change what is already fated to happen. Furthermore, God can’t even change any of it. Rather God, just exists on this perfect level above us. Even the Epicureans insisted that God can’t be bothered to think about us. This is why Paul says that the crucifixion of Jesus is foolishness to Greek Philosophers. The Greeks also rejected any idea of God creating the universe. Rather, the universe exists necessarily. But necessary truths cannot fail to be true. Therefore, how is it possible that things in the universe ever change? Their simple answer was that time moves in a big repeating circle. Everything that has happened will happen again in a big time loop. It never stops. It’s not really going anywhere. It just goes around and around.

Christians pushed back and insisted that God did create the world. Furthermore, they insisted that time was linear. It is progressing towards God’s goal. Fatalism is not the same as God’s predestination. God can predestine whatever He wants. But under fatalism, He can’t. It’s all logically necessary. God literally can’t change anything. Changing anything is logically impossible. For God to change even the tiniest thing would be like making a square circle. The Medieval Philosophers managed to refute fatalism. They basically argued the future event makes the statement true, not the other way around. But it is a bit more complicated than that.

I’m not wishing to rehearse the history of the rise and fall of fatalism. I bring up fatalism really only to get you thinking. What about conditional statements? Fatalism looked at propositional statements. “You will eat the pancakes.” And that propositional statement has a truth value. But a conditional statement is more like this. Let’s say it’s raining outside. So you may say, “If I you go outside, I will get wet.” Now, you may never go outside. You may stay perfectly dry. But the conditional statement does have truth value. It is true that if you go outside, you will get wet. So it is a truth that is contrary to the fact. The fact is that you stay dry inside the house. But the truth is that if you went outside, you would get wet.

One way to define God’s attribute of Omniscience is to say that God knows the truth value of all propositions. (Although a good case can be made for non propositional truths too.) So God knows the truth value of propositions about the past, present, and future. But does God also know the truth value of counterfactual propositions? It seems that a God who possesses this knowledge is a greater God. Knowledge of the truth value of counterfactual propositions is called God’s Middle Knowledge. It’s not really about the way the world is, has been, or will be. It’s in a different category. It’s about they way the would would be if something happens. And that can be a truth that stays true even though what would be never actually is.

It’s clearly a greater level of knowledge than simple knowledge of propositions about the future. God knows what would happen if something happened, even if it doesn’t happen. And God would have to be a maximally great being, provided we can justify belief in God’s existence. God can’t sit back and wish He was greater. That greater God, even if it doesn’t exist, would then really be God’s God. And that makes no sense. Whatever God worships would just be what we worship too.

But what about the example of Peter’s denial? This is a classic example in discussions of Molinism. Examine this counterfactual proposition. “If Peter is in this time and place and faced with this situation, he will deny ever knowing Jesus of his own free choice.” That counterfactual proposition must have truth value. And God would know it by virtue of His middle knowledge. Notice that we are asking not whether God knows what Peter would do a situation. We are asking if God knows what Peter would freely do in a situation? That second counterfactual proposition must have truth value. And God would have to know it. It’s key here to see that we are focusing on a counterfactual proposition about what Peter would or would not do of his own free will. It seems clear that such a proposition would have truth value. And God would have to know it.

Thus, by virtue of His middle knowledge, God can exercise control over what Peter does while Peter also is in total control. God has knowledge of exactly what Peter will freely choose to do in any situation. Therefore, God can simply control the situation and thereby decide what Peter will and will not do. But Peter will be doing it of his own free choice. The key to understand is that counterfactual propositions about our freely made decisions must have truth value.

You may be thinking that God simply knows Peter’s personality or character. Perhaps God predicts Peter’s actions based on that? But that is assuming that Peter isn’t free to deny or not deny Christ. If Peter simply is a complete slave to his personality, then he isn’t free to choose one action or another. But what about the counterfactual proposition of what Peter would actually freely choose to do in the strictest sense of free will? That proposition has truth value.

God knows not only what we will freely do, but what we will freely do in a certain condition. Therefore, our freedom doesn’t interfere with God’s control. This is because God controls the conditions. Again, let me reiterate this. The key to understand is that counterfactual propositions about our freely made decisions must have truth value.

Now you may still have problems with this idea at this point. I think I can guess what those problems are. It may sound like God simply knows what Peter’s character is. Thus, God knows that Peter is the type of person who behaves a certain way in a certain situation. But that’s not really it. God would have to know the truth value of counterfactual propositions directly, without referring to a person’s character. That’s how we predict a person’s behavior. But God would know the truth value of propositions directly.

But you may still wonder if this is really contradicting God’s Aseity. How does God know what will happen? How does God know the truth value of these conditional statements? That’s what we’ll go to next.

Possible Worlds and how God knows Counterfactuals?

Let’s say you are parking your car. It’s possible that you parked it two inches further to the left. That’s not what you did. But that’s possible. In possible worlds semantics, we can just say that there is a possible world where you parked two inches to the left. This world may or may not exist. The actual world is also a possible world. It must be possible for it to exist for it to actually exist.

This idea is easily confused with the concept of a multiverse from physics. That is a different thing. Let’s say that a parallel universe exists. Let’s say that you can travel between your universe and the other. Both of them together compose the multiverse. But then, the entire multiverse just is simply the actual world. A possible world really is just about what’s logically possible. It’s logically possible that you parked your car two inches to the left. So we say there is a possible world where you parked your car two inches to the left. But there is no possible world where the number 3 equals the number 4.

So the set of all possible worlds only includes logical possibilities. There is a world where dinosaurs still roam the earth. There is a world where the earth collided with another planet. There is a world where you are the president of the United States. But there is no world where the fundamental laws of mathematics and logic fail to be true. Newton’s third law of motion is Force = Mass x Acceleration. There is a world where that law is F=MA(0.999). But there is no world where 7 – 2 = 587. There is no world where Donald Trump weighs more than the number 7. There is no world where the number 7 is located behind a tree at your Grandmother’s house.

What this means is that the set of worlds that are possible is bounded by what is logically impossible. Therefore, the set of possible worlds must be possible. They cannot fail to not be logically impossible. (Splitting the infinitive is a strength of the English language!) Therefore, the set of possible worlds is logically necessary. Thus, God would possess knowledge of all possible worlds. And that means that God’s Middle Knowledge is due to His knowledge of all possible worlds.

In other words, all of the possibilities are not something God has knowledge of that comes from outside Himself. It’s purely mentally deduced. We know that 3 + 4 = 7. And we do not know this by observation. You know it’s true just by thinking about it. The set of possible worlds is necessarily what it is. And this includes all counterfactual propositions. Then God’s knowledge of what we will freely do in a given situation is purely not dependent on anything outside of Himself. God has Middle Knowledge and Aseity. And we have the freedom to choose good or evil. But, boy, it’s kinda hard to grasp. The Greeks thought that everything that actually did happen was logically necessary. Today we disagree. But we can say that everything that can possibly happen is logically necessary.

Why not Create a world without Evil?

Finally, is there a possible world where no evil exists? Why didn’t God choose to make that world? Why can’t it be the case that there is a world where everyone avoids evil and does good in literally every situation he or she faces? At this point, we are way way out in the weeds. What I mean is that you’ll need to understand everything before this pretty well in order to move ahead.

Let’s go back to the fundamentals here of our counterfactual propositions. Peter, if in situation A, will be good instead of bad. Let’s say that Judas will also do the same thing in situation A. Hopefully you can see the problem already. These counterfactual propositions speak about what specific people will do in a certain situation. Counterfactual propositions about Peter are about Peter and not Judas. What if every person responded exactly the same to every situation?

If Counterfactual Propositions are literally the same for all people, then only one person exists. There might be many millions or people present in terms of how many bodies are physically in the world. But mentally, every person is the same. It’s really just one person in many bodies. As soon as much complexity is introduced into the world, then this means that someone somewhere will commit a sin. It’s unavoidable. A world where every person will never sin in all situations is a world where only one person exists. Different people will respond differently or else they are the same person. Furthermore, there are situations that many different people share the experience of dealing with. (Ending in a preposition is often the clearest way to say it!)

The problem of evil wrestles with why God would allow evil to exist. A classic response involves stating that your human freedom to make your own choice is a great good. The greatness of this good outweighs the negativity of the evil. I want to add to this. Isn’t the diversity and complexity of humanity also a great good? Isn’t it a good thing when another person is born? Each individual life has it’s own unique presence and value. God didn’t create another random person when you were born. God created you specifically. The idea is that love is only meaningful when it’s directed at a specific person. A teenager who says, “I just want a girlfriend” has not found love. When he’s in love he says, “I want you.” There is something uniquely valuable about each person. Humanity is incredibly diverse.

Furthermore, human free will seems to be directly connected to human individuality. You are your own person and you make your own choices. That’s essential to the fact that you are an individual. If you are just another human born on earth with a forgettable number, you are not loved. For love to be present, you must have a name.

We can use science fiction and comic books to illustrate these points. In Star Trek, the Borg are persons that have much of their brains replaced with computers. This removes their individuality and free will. They call themselves the collective. When humans are fighting the Borg, who are very powerful, we feel the fear as passive viewers. We instantly and intuitively recognize that the loss of one’s individuality is a nightmare come true. Thus, we recognize that the complexity and diversity of humanity is a great good.

It might be the case that God could have made a world where only one person exists. But a world with many people can bring into reality more good outcomes. More people do the right thing and obey God. More people get saved. More people have the love of Christ for each other. Still, this means that complexity of humanity makes sin unavoidable. It’s logically necessary. For when many different humans to exist, we end up with people responding differently to situations. But, human individuality makes each person special and therefore lovable. This is a great good. So, just like human freedom is a great good, human individuality is also.

We can also look at DC Comics for an illustration. Here, Darkseid is a main villain. He is engaged in a never ending search for something called the “Anti Life Equation.” This will give him the ability to end all of the chaos in the world by ending human free will. Then he will simply control everything that everyone does. The funny thing is that many Calvinists (not all) believe this is exactly how things are. God is literally already doing this in their view. But when we are reading a story about Darkseid, we instantly and intuitively recognize how bad this is. We want Superman to stop him and preserve human freedom.

We want to live. Living is good. We celebrate births. We don’t want to die. If you don’t control your own thoughts, you aren’t really alive. If a man takes a knife and murders another man, you don’t arrest the knife for murder. That’s because the knife has no control over it’s own actions. But if some Calvinists insist that we have no such control, then their Calvinism is really the view that we don’t exist. Spinoza held that view. The early Dutch Calvinists embraced him at first. But then they realized that he took Dutch Calvinism to it’s logical conclusion. If you think that view humanity and God is ridiculous, then you think this type of Calvinism is ridiculous.  I should add that this type of Calvinism is still very popular and defended as solidly Biblical.

The problem of evil is perhaps the biggest one of all for any type of Calvinism.   But it's even worse in this still very popular variety.  If humans don’t control their own decisions, then God is the creator and perpetrator of all evil actions. Simply saying that God “ordains” it is a silly word game to avoid admitting the obvious truth. People try to hide the irrationality and weakness of their view with fancy words. And, they often hide it from themselves this way. Some Calvinists, like the late John MacArthur, simply say that there is human responsibility. But he doesn’t fully understand how all this works. That is a much more respectable position.

Others don’t do so well. Some actually defend the idea that all evil is God’s fault. Understand, they are defending the idea that God is really the one who bears the guilt for the holocaust, all rape, etc. To them, God is literally who Jesus died for on the cross. You can’t dress this up with words like “God ordains evil” and expect others not to see through it. The Nazis ordained the Holocaust, not God.

Many popular Calvinists argue that God is responsible for all the evil of all time, but God also brought about good that outweighs it. The problem with this is that, on their view, God could have simply caused there to be no evil. This is truly a blasphemous heretical stance. God is fundamentally not evil. They can’t say that God allows human freedom as a great good that makes allowing evil logically necessary. They can’t say that God allows human individuality and population growth as a great good that makes allowing evil necessary. They reject human freedom as fundamentally incompatible with God’s greatness. Thus, they force themselves to conclude that God is literally the source of all evil. This literally is their view.

I don’t mean to belittle Calvinism more than to use it to highlight the importance of this question. Molinism needs to be defended if for no other reason than to allow Christians to avoid heresies like this. And let me be clear, Calvinists are not heretics. It’s just that they tend to avoid thinking about the heretical things entailed by their views. John Piper has a video online where he literally counsels Christians not to think about these things. And let me add that Calvinism has an important point to make. God must be truly great. God must know the future. And God must control what He knows about our choices. God owes us nothing, but He still loves us.

But can we simply say that we don’t exist except as tools that God uses to commit sins or do good deeds? And when we are used as a tool to help others, aren’t those others literally mindless tools too? This all too popular form of Calvinism entails that the universe is just God playing with his toys, pretending they are alive. Allow yourself to admit that perhaps you need to go back to the drawing board on that one.

Nevertheless, Calvinism flows from a noble pursuit. They want to uphold God’s greatness and glory. That’s a virtuous mission. A modern problem is that it can often end up being used as a tool to create the “in” group or the cool club. This is taking the classic Doctrines of Grace and using them to prop up one’s own popularity. And that’s just not cool at all. And a lot of good Calvinists have no patience with that.

Appendix: Answering Objections to Molinism

1) According to Molinism, there are some people God cannot save. In other words, there are things God cannot do.

This has been answered in the above article. A world with enough diversity will have some evil.

2)God could have saved everyone, but he just didn’t. This is basically what people don’t like about Calvinism. So Molinism does no better.

This has been answered in the above article. A world with enough diversity will have some evil.

3) Criticizing a view because it makes God unwilling to save all is focused on Man instead of God’s glory.

There is a false “either or” at work here. In reality, there is a third perspective. God’s love for others is an essential component of what makes Him great. As 1 John tells us, “God is Love.” This objection is like asking a person if he wants to be eaten by a lion or a bear. I have to ask, “Are those really the only two options?”

4)Calvinism affirms Free Will too

Calvinists who say this typically affirm Compatibilism and calls it a belief in Free Will. This amounts to covering up the irrationality and problems with one’s view with fancy and complicated language. This type of bad argument is all too common. And, really, people do this to hide the problems with their view from themselves. Compatibilism means that God controls what desires you have. You sin because God gave you the desire to sin. And you are free to choose whatever you want, as long as it fits with the God given desires. They argue that to do anything you have to have the desire to do it first. Thus, they deny that you literally originate your free will choices. Rather, they are determined by what desires you previously had. This ain’t what everyone other than Compatibilists mean by “Free Will.” This also seems to ignore out ability to resist our desires with effort.

5)If the difference between saved and unsaved people is their own effort, then we can take pride in something before God.

This assumes that the measure of one’s Greatness is going to Heaven or not. But the Biblical standard is that of obedience to God’s laws. All who gain forgiveness failed to do that. We shouldn’t just switch the standards. Furthermore, Molinism tends to take the wind out of the sails on this one when one properly understands it.

3) The Grounding Objection: There is nothing that exists to make counterfactual propositions true.

This is the strongest objection to Molinism. It appeals to something in metaphysics called Truth Maker Theory. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the study of reality. Although many use the term as a synonym for magic and mysticism, that’s not what it really means.

Physics is the most basic study of reality that science provides. Metaphysics is more basic still. There are things that simply are assumed true in physics. They are not questioned and no attempt is made to prove them. But metaphysics allows you to ask literally any question about reality that you want. There are centuries of scholarly articles debating things that are just assumed true in physics. The problem with pretty much all branches of philosophy is that progress is incredibly slow. This is precisely because everything is questioned.

One debate in metaphysics is over Truth Maker Theory. There are different forms of Truth Maker Theory. We are discussing the strong form. Imagine that you are sitting at the table in your kitchen. Imagine that there is nothing on the table but a red apple. You could say, “There is an apple on the table.” But why is that statement a true statement? According to truth maker theory, there must be something in reality that makes the statement true. In this case, it is the real apple on the real table. The idea is that for any claim about reality to be true instead of false, there must be a real truth maker that actually makes it true.

According to the grounding objection, counterfactual propositions can’t possibly have truth makers. They are about what might be. They may never come to pass if the conditions are never met. Thus, it is argued, they can’t have a negative or positive truth value. Thus, there is no truth value for God to know about. They simply are neither true or false. In that case, God would have no Middle Knowledge since there would be no such thing to have.

Truth Maker Theory may seem relatively uncontroversial. But what about this statement? “Dinosaurs once roamed the earth.” What makes that true? The past no longer exists. So how can something that doesn’t exist be the truth maker? The fossils currently exist. But they are the residue of the past existence of the dinosaurs. The actual dinosaurs no longer roam the earth. The fossils are just how we know they did. They are not identical to the dinosaurs themselves.

So if you buy into truth maker theory, you’d have to say that the past still exists. You’d have to say that the passage of time is an illusion. The same holds for statements about the future. Some of them must be true. But the truth maker doesn’t exist yet since the statement is about the future.

The problems for Truth Maker Theory get weirder.

What about possible worlds? There is a possible world where you parked your car two inches to the left instead of where you did in the actual world. What is it that makes this true? So many things are possible. How can there be a truth maker for every possibility? Thus, Strong Truth Maker Theory forces you to accept that every single possibility is actually real in alternate realities. There would therefore be an infinite number of realities. In Metaphysics, this is what is known as a bloated ontology. Your ontology is your set of things you believe to actually exist. A bloated ontology is a sign of bad metaphysics.

Furthermore, there must be an infinite number of variations on our world. This bloated ontology requires you to believe that an actual infinite exists. Actual infinities run into all sorts of metaphysical problems and are best understood as metaphysically impossible. They cannot exist. I won’t go into it here except to say that this is discussed in more detail in videos and articles regarding the Kalaam Cosmological Argument.

Thus, appealing to Strong Truth Maker Theory as an objection to Molinism comes at a great cost. It has problems of it’s own and thus isn’t proven itself. This makes it weak ammunition against Molinism.